Artists who made history

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week’s Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. Our guest is Professor Rachel E. Johnson, Professor of Modern African History at Durham University in the UK.We begin with the 50th anniversary of the Soweto Uprising, which bec ...  Show more

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. And today, we’re celebrating international archives week, set up to highlight the importance of protecting the world's historical records.Our guest is BBC curator Joe Schultz wh ...  Show more

In 1966, a Russian painter and archaeologist, Igor Savitsky, created a museum in the remote desert of Uzbekistan, where he stored tens of thousands of works of art that he had saved from Stalin's censors. The Savitsky museum, in Nukus, is now recognised as one of the greatest col ...  Show more

Sixty years ago a young art historian got to know the greatest painter in the world.John Richardson met Picasso in the South of France in 1951.Photo: AFP/Getty 

In the summer of 1951 a young art historian called John Richardson met one of the greatest painters of the modern era. Richardson was part of Picasso's circle in the South of France for the rest of the 1950s and then spent the rest of his life writing the definitive biography of ...  Show more

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the context and impact of Pablo Picasso's iconic work, created soon after the bombing on 26th April 1937 that obliterated much of the Basque town of Guernica, and its people. The attack was carried out by warplanes of the German Condor Legion, join ...  Show more